5 Recruiting Developers

Unless your package is a fairly small, you probably won’t do all the
work on it yourself. Most maintainers recruit other developers to help.

Sometimes people will offer to help. Some of them will be capable,
while others will not. It’s up to you to determine who provides useful
help, and encourage those people to participate more.

Some of the people who offer to help will support the GNU Project, while
others may be interested for other reasons. Some will support the goals
of the Free Software Movement, but some may not. They are all welcome
to help with the work—we don’t ask people’s views or motivations
before they contribute to GNU packages.

As a consequence, you cannot expect all contributors to support the GNU
Project, or to have a concern for its policies and standards. So part
of your job as maintainer is to exercise your authority on these points
when they arise. No matter how much of the work other people do, you
are in charge of what goes in the release. When a crucial point arises,
you should calmly state your decision and stick to it.

Sometimes a package has several co-maintainers who share the role of
maintainer. Unlike developers who help, co-maintainers have actually
been appointed jointly as the maintainers of the package, and they carry
out the maintainer’s functions together. If you would like to propose
some of your developers as co-maintainers, please contact
maintainers@gnu.org.